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Reflux Project

Worldwide Telecommunication Art Project
21st São Paulo Biennial | multinational locations | 1991 - 1992.

The Reflux Project evolved out of the idea that large scale telecomunication art events could be designed in terms of their informational flow. Its main objective was to build a structure to entail different creative teams from around the world to generate dialogical or interactive art works. Successive phases were designed covering every aspect of the 

art event, from inception to closure.

The Reflux Project differed from other telecommunication events in that it proposed a decentralized structure, suggesting an alternative model for intercommunication on a planetary scale. The concepts of decentralization and interactivity were supposed to inform every successive phase so that the network community would generate an event as a distributed ecosystem, without a supervising center.

The project postulated that participating groups and individuals on each node would have the autonomy to conceive their own proposals of dialogical art -- Influxes -- and send them to the whole network, spread throughout the planet. Each proposing node, after receiving responses -- Fluxes -- to its proposal from other nodes, was to collect and resend them to every node in the network, completing a movement of Reflux.

The event opened up to remote participants the opportunity to form a node, propose a theme, a media format for interchange, and to initiate exchanges with any other node. Furthermore, the ensuing informational flow would

in the end be synthesized and redistributed to everyone, in the form of a catalogue and/or an electronic database,

the Metafluxes.

The Reflux Project
Event of a Geotronic Revolution 
Artur Matuck 

"The Reflux Project encompassed a long series of telecommunication art events from January 1991 to March 1992. Aesthetic discourses were exchanged through fax, computer, telephone, and videophone. 
Reflux was designed in terms of its informational flow. Participating nodes would conceive proposals of dialogical art (Influxes) and send them to the network. Each node, after receiving responses (Fluxes) to its proposal, was to collect and resend them to the network, completing a movement of Reflux. 
By August 1991 the Reflux network included two production

centers - at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, USA and at the 21st São Paulo International Biennial, in Brazil. 
Furthermore twenty-six nodes were interconnected

forming a worldwide electronic community. 
Reflux proposals were quite varied in scope since

the protocols did not limit themes or media. Most proposals, however, stressed the collective creation of texts and images. Teleactive media events also connected Reflux nodes from September 1991 to January 1992. Refluxers devised original interactive forms of teleconferencing and teleperforming using videophone, fax, telephone. 
Featuring individual and collective performances,

including artists, intellectuals, and children,

the exchanges invariably generated a strong sense of

long distance companionship.

Refluxers felt they were sharing a previleged aesthetic

experience, participating in a planetary neural connection." 
"Network artists utilizing telecommunication media are

redefining the geographical frontiers of our planet. They are taking the initiative of using the telecommunications media to establish connections between individuals beyond existing frontiers, transbordering institutionalized governments and state structures. They are challenging geographical, linguistic, political, and cultural limits, instituting new models for intercommunication and 
interactivity between cultural agents." 


Artur Matuck, 1991 

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